Norwegian retail brand Carlings were opening their very first webshop despite having sold clothes in more than 200 stores for decades. So the challenge was to create traffic and market share for an average webshop in a giant ocean of e-commerce.
FROM A DECADE TOO LATE — TO A DECADE AHEAD. Our creative springboard became the vision of taking the webshop from being 10 years behind, to be 10 years ahead of its time. We crossed that idea with a fashion industry that is under severe criticism for its pollution, and where clothing waste has never been more extensive. This became the cornerstone of the world's first digital clothing collection with zero% negative environmental impact. The collection consists of virtual clothes that today’s 18-25-year-olds can wear on social media in order to showcase their fashion creativity without harming our planet.
Describe the strategy
Research from Barclaycard, which sees nearly half of Britain’s credit and debit card transactions, shows that ‘outfit of the day’ posts have literally become just that. Almost two in ten Brits reveal that they have bought clothes online (17%) to wear once with the aim of posting a photo to social media and subsequently returning their purchases. The hashtag #ootd (Outfit Of The Day) alone has 280 mill. posts on Instagram. That's why Carlings set out to make a clothing collection for the urban minded youth between 18 to 25 years old, who are environmentally conscious and who are forced to participate in the world's mass production waste in clothing if they want to keep up with the big creative fashion output standards on social media.
Describe the execution
PROCESS AND STYLE ELEMENTS: Via mobile photo meta-data, a virtual tailor adjusts the clothes in the 3D program Marvelous Designer, where digital clothing design is created in the same way as real clothes. And because it is digital, there is an infinite number of pieces available once a piece has been created. This means an infinite clothing collection, whose production has had zero% negative impact on the environment. The electricity was produced with green energy, and all income went directly to WaterAid.com. TIMELINE: The virtual collection was available from mid-November to mid-December SCALE: Because it is digital, there is an infinite number of pieces available once a piece has been created.
List the results
The digital collection served as a driver for Carling's newly opened webshop for ordinary clothes, and made the site the most innovative player on the field when it comes to future solutions to the current clothing and environmental crisis. The collection traveled across the globe and drew headlines from international and leading media such as Hypebeast, i-D, PaperMag, Vogue and Wired. Website traffic got increased by more than 56%, and the collection sold +200 pieces every week to people from more than 30 countries within the test period.